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Statement and acknowledgements -- Welcome and announcements -- Introductory information -- Congress committees -- The academic program -- Formal meetings of the IAHR -- The Congress Director's general report of the XXth IAHR Congress -- The Congress Administrator's statistical report -- Abstracts of papers for the XXth IAHR Congress -- Alphabetic list of all Congress participants.

This volume is the adjunct proceedings on methodology from the XVIIth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, held in Mexico City in 1995. Taken together, the essays present a thorough and coherent perspective on studying religion as an item of human culture.

"Traditions in Contact and Change" was the theme of the fourteenth quinquennial congress of the International Association for the History of Religions. This selection from 450 papers by scholars form all over the world address the theme. Section One, "Indian Traditions and Western Interactions," treats subjects ranging from the flood story in Vedic ritual to a s study of the women of the Nehru family. Section Two, "Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese Studies," includes discussions of the origin of the Mahayana, William James and Japanese Buddhism, and lyrical imagery and religious content in Japanese art. Section Three, "Mediterranean Cultures," covers a broad range of topics, from foster children in early Christianity to "the transformation of Christianity into Roman religion" to the change in the status of women in Iceland from pagan to Christian times. Section Four, "Islamic, African, and Amerindian Developments," examines such subjects as religions in conflict and change in the works of African novelists, tradition and change in Indian Islam, and religious acculturation among Oglala Lakota. Section Five offers "Methodological and Theoretical Discussions" of women's studies, Western perceptions of Asia, structure in Jung and Lévi-Strauss, among others. The essays provide ready access to the leading edge of scholarship across a wide range of religions and cultures and should be of interest to students of religion, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy.

This volume is based upon papers read during the innovative section "Western Esotericism and the Science of Religion" organized at the 17th International Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) in Mexico City, August 5-12, 1995. The section was created in order to fill a long-standing hiatus in the academic study of religions: whereas phenomena such as gnosticism and hermetism in antiquity, and even the occult sciences of that period, have long been recognized as subjects worthy of serious investigation, the history of similar and related phenomena in more recent periods has hardly received the same measure of scholarly attention and recognition. The present volume is devoted to the academic emancipation of these areas as constituting a legitimate domain of research, which may be referred to by the generic label "western esotericism". Preceded by an introductory essay on the birth of this new discipline in the study of religion, the volume provides a sample of current research in the field and devotes special attention to some central methodological questions.